Chapter 18
NAROD
The meeting proceeds with admirable efficiency.
I stand near the credenza and listen, which was not the original plan.
The original plan was to set down the box, confirm the Greenfield information, and leave.
That was the plan I constructed on the cab ride over, the neat, considerate, non-disruptive version of this visit that respected the professional context and did not impose on Livia's territory or her colleagues' time.
I have been aware for approximately eleven weeks now that my plans, when Livia is in the room, have a statistically notable failure rate.
She is standing at the front of the room with her presentation loaded behind her, and her posture is the posture she uses when she is confident but being careful about showing it, shoulders deliberately level, her weight balanced, the small precise gestures she makes with the clicker when she is advancing through information she has already absorbed and is now delivering from memory rather than reading.
She pushed her glasses up before she started and she has not touched them since.
When she is uncertain she touches them constantly.
When she knows exactly what she is doing, they simply stay on her face and she ignores them.
She knows exactly what she is doing.
The partners are asking questions. The one called Martin has a habit of interrupting mid-sentence to demonstrate comprehension, which is a technique I recognise from colleagues who are more concerned with signalling intelligence than acquiring information.
Livia handles it with the patience of someone who has been handling it for years, absorbing the interruption, incorporating his point, continuing the thread so smoothly that he likely believes he contributed to it.
He did not contribute to it. The thread was entirely hers. I find this somewhat breathtaking.
At the forty-seven minute mark she pulls up a comparative analysis slide that I genuinely had not expected.
She has cross-referenced three separate fiscal years against an index of sector-wide trends and built a visual model that collapses what would normally be a twenty-minute verbal explanation into something a person can understand in about six seconds.
Martin stops mid-inhale. Dhruv leans forward.
Petra makes a small noise that is not quite a word and writes something down with what appears to be enthusiasm.
Livia advances to the next slide with the same measured composure she has maintained for the past hour, as though she has not just handed them something extraordinary, and I become aware that I have stopped paying attention to the exits or the structural load-bearing capacity of the conference room furniture and am simply watching her with the full, undivided attention that my brain rarely allocates to a single input.
She glances at me once, briefly, the way she does when she knows I am watching and wants me to know she knows. The corner of her mouth does not move. Her eyes, behind the dark frames, are amused, warm and entirely focused, all at once, and then she looks back at her slide and continues.
At the ninety-two minute mark, the formal presentation ends.
There is a pause while Martin and Dhruv exchange the particular look of senior partners who have just received information that exceeded their expectations and are deciding how to respond in a way that does not communicate this too openly.
Petra is still writing. Simon, who has been quiet throughout, closes his portfolio and nods once, which I am fairly certain constitutes high praise in his specific vocabulary.
Livia clicks off the projector. The screen goes dark. She says,
"I can circulate the full working file by end of day."
Martin says something about the Q3 projections that requires a clarifying question, and Dhruv asks a follow-up, and the room shifts into the informal post-presentation phase where the actual conversation begins, and Livia fields three simultaneous threads with the same precise economy of attention she applies to everything, and I make a decision.
It is not a considered decision, not in the actuarial sense. I reach for the bakery box from the credenza and I walk across the conference room to her.
The room does not go silent the way the bar did on the first night.
These are professionals. They are better at maintaining composure than a Tuesday-evening cocktail crowd.
But the conversation does undergo a notable adjustment in volume and tempo, and four sets of eyes recalculate as I cover the distance from the credenza to the head of the table in about four steps.
Livia turns to look at me. I have learned to read the specific taxonomy of her expressions with some precision over eleven weeks, and what her face does right now is a sequence that moves through mild surprise, rapid comprehension, and then something quieter and more private that she does not always let reach the surface in professional settings. She lets it reach the surface now.
I open the box. The croissants are still fractionally warm because I timed the stop correctly and the cab was efficient. I hold the box toward her with both hands because this is not a one-handed offering, this is the point of the entire exercise, and I say,
"Ninety-two minutes. You did not eat before you left this morning.
Your blood sugar will be approaching the threshold where your annotation quality declines, which would be a waste of an otherwise exceptional morning.
" I keep my voice at its natural register, which is to say I do not lower it and I do not raise it and I do not make any adjustment whatsoever for the four people in this room who are not her.
"The cardamom is from the second tray. I asked specifically.
You said the first tray at that bakery is always slightly under-proofed. "
Livia looks at the box. She looks up at me. There is a pause of approximately two seconds, during which I become acutely aware that the room has gone completely silent and that my pulse is doing something erratic and entirely inconvenient beneath the collar of my shirt.
Her eyebrows lift fractionally behind her dark-framed glasses, and she tilts her head in that particular way she does when she is recalculating an assumption in real time.
"You asked the bakery which tray the croissants were from," she says, her voice slow and deliberate, as though she is testing the words for accuracy as she speaks them aloud.
I nod once, keeping my shoulders square and my hands steady on the box because if I allow myself to register the full weight of this moment I will very likely drop the entire offering on the floor.
"I asked the bakery which tray the croissants were from," I confirm, and my voice comes out lower, rougher at the edges, because I have been awake since four-thirty this morning and I have been thinking about this specific interaction for the better part of three days.
"Narod." Her voice has the texture it gets when she is doing the thing where she is moved and finds it inconvenient. "That is either incredibly thoughtful or it is a sign of a genuinely alarming level of pastry-related risk assessment."
"I see no meaningful distinction between those two things."
She takes a croissant from the box. She does it without looking away from me, which means she trusts the placement, which means she trusts my hands, and I find that this small logistical fact does something significant to the interior of my chest. She takes one clean, unselfconscious bite, and her expression shifts into the specific one that means the croissant is correct.
She is still looking at me when she says it, her voice quiet and entirely direct,
"The second tray. You actually asked."
I set the bakery box on the table beside her.
Martin has stopped speaking and Dhruv has put his pen down and Petra is watching with the open curiosity of someone who has abandoned the pretence of note-taking.
I do not especially care about any of that, and for the first time in my adult professional life, I am not mentally cataloguing the ways my presence might be making the humans in the room uncomfortable.
I am not running probability assessments on their reactions.
I am not calculating adjustments to my posture or my volume or the angle of my tusks.
I reach up and tuck a piece of Livia's hair behind her ear, which has come loose from where she pinned it this morning, and I feel the slight catch of her breath that she makes when I do something unexpected, which is a sound I have been cataloguing in an entirely different kind of spreadsheet.
I lower my head and I kiss her, unhurriedly, in the way I kiss her when I mean it and not the way I kiss her when we are in a hurry, and she makes a small sound against my mouth and brings one hand up to my lapel and holds the croissant in the other with great presence of mind, and the conference room is absolutely silent.
When I straighten back up, she is looking at me with her chin slightly lifted and her glasses minutely askew and the expression on her face that I have been trying to find the right actuarial notation for since approximately the third week and have ultimately concluded cannot be represented in any existing model.
She reaches up and straightens her glasses with one finger.
"The partners are still here," she says very quietly, though it sounds distinctly like a fact she is presenting rather than a concern she particularly holds.
"The partners," I say and nod. I keep eye contact when I say it, because the location and professional standing of every individual in this room has been comprehensively accounted for in my assessment of the situation, and I have decided that the current priorities outweigh the associated risks by a statistically significant margin.
"You don't appear especially concerned about that," she observes, and there is something in her voice that sounds like she is testing a hypothesis, like she is running the numbers on a version of me that she has not entirely seen before and is now cataloguing for future reference.
"I am not especially concerned about that," I confirm, still holding her gaze. Her pupils dilate very slightly behind her glasses.
Her mouth does the thing that is not quite a smile but contains an entire smile inside it, compressed, warm and entirely intended for me, and I feel it in the same place I felt the hair-tuck and the sound she made, which is the same place I have apparently been feeling everything for eleven weeks, which is every available square inch of me.
I grab the bakery box. I turn to face the table.
Martin, Dhruv, Petra, and Simon are arranged in the specific formation of people who have witnessed something that reorganised the parameters of their morning and are still completing the reorganisation.
Martin's pen is held vertically and he is not writing with it.
Dhruv has an expression I would classify as benign bewilderment.
Petra appears genuinely delighted. Simon's face is doing something that I will tentatively categorise as approval, though his range is narrow and I have limited data.
I place the box in the centre of the table. There are four croissants remaining.
"Second tray," I say. "The cardamom is more developed.
I would suggest them while they retain some warmth.
" I look at Martin specifically, because Martin interrupted Livia six times during the presentation and I feel this information is worth directing at him with some deliberateness.
"The Q3 projections she mentioned are supported by the variance analysis in the fourth slide.
The numbers are sound. The presentation was exceptional.
I would encourage you to tell her so." I button my jacket with one hand, which takes some effort given the tailoring, but I had the suit made specifically to allow for the full range of my shoulder movement and it manages.
"I hope the rest of your meeting is productive. Enjoy the pastries."
I look at Livia one more time. She has both hands wrapped around the remnant of her croissant and she is watching me with the steady, clear expression she uses when she has made a decision and is comfortable with it, and it is possible the most settling thing I have ever seen in my life.
"I'll see you tonight," she says. It is not a question.
"Yes," I say. "You will."
I cross the conference room, duck marginally through the doorway, and pull the glass door shut behind me with appropriate gentleness, because it is a glass door and I am making a point but I am not making a point at the expense of the architecture.
The corridor outside is wide and quiet and smells of carpet cleaning solution and recycled air.
I walk toward the lifts. My heart is doing something that bears no clinical resemblance to its resting rate, which is a condition I have grown somewhat accustomed to and no longer attempt to regulate. I press the lift button. I wait.
Behind me, through the glass wall of the conference room, I can hear the muffled, specific quality of a room that has resumed conversation after a prolonged silence. Then, distinctly, I hear Dhruv say something I cannot fully make out, and I hear Petra laugh.
The lift arrives.
I step in.
And through the closing gap of the doors, carried clearly through the glass, I hear the voice of the one called Martin, landed flat with the bewilderment of a man assembling data in real time, asking the one question the morning has apparently been building toward.
"Was that... your boyfriend?"
The doors close.
I press the ground floor button, and I allow myself, in the complete privacy of an empty lift, the full, uncontained, entirely inelegant smile that I have been declining to produce for the past fifteen minutes, and I do not attempt to make it look smaller or less conspicuous than it is, because there is no one here to recalibrate it for, and the doors are shut, and I am six foot nine and built like a structural feature, and I am completely, embarrassingly, and with full statistical certainty, in love with a human accountant who asked the bakery about the tray.